


The Afterlife & Times of Dr. Badass

by lyricalprose (fairylights)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, Heaven
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-18
Updated: 2013-07-18
Packaged: 2017-12-20 13:41:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,533
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/887927
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fairylights/pseuds/lyricalprose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ash is dead. It’s okay. He’s cool with it. It’s not like there’s nothing to do or anything, once he gets through Heaven's bitch of a firewall. </p><p>Plus, you know, the Winchesters keep showing up, and he keeps having to take care of their sorry asses.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Afterlife & Times of Dr. Badass

  
Dying in a burning bar wasn't really high up on Ash's list of Ways I've Thought About Dying (and there _was_ a list, an honest-to-God list – "burned alive" was at #38 between "drowning" and "crushed by falling piano").  
  
And technically, he'd have to admit that "burned alive" was a little dramatic. He was pretty sure that smoke inhalation was what actually got him, from the way that his lungs felt like their insides were slicked up with tar and his throat started closing in before he hit the floor.  
  
But anyways, Ash died. It wasn't exactly pretty and it wasn't in the time or the fashion he would've picked (he was kinda looking forward to being an eccentric old guy someday – you know, the genius recluse with mad demon-tracking skills and a garage fridge full of PBR) but it happened, and if there's one thing that Ash has always been good at, it's rolling with the punches.  
  
The first thing Ash sees when he wakes up in Heaven (and boy if that isn't kind of a weird statement, from a metaphysical point of view, you know) is Ellen standing in front of the pool table at the Roadhouse, smiling and telling him "Son, you can stay here as long as you like."  
  
The first thing he says is " _Shit,_ Ellen, you're dead too?" because he was pretty damn sure (pretty damn grateful) that she wasn't in the place when it went up like a Roman candle – but she doesn't respond, just turns around and walks back behind the bar, and something feels weird because he _remembers_ this, remembers walking into the Roadhouse five years ago, a scruffy ex-college boy who knew a little something about something and maybe wanted to do something about it. He remembers meeting Ellen, remembers her telling him he could stay so long as he didn't drink all of her beer, remembers that it was the first time anyone had asked him to _stay_ anywhere instead of chucking him out the door headfirst.  
  
So, his working theory becomes: Heaven's your best memories, played out over and over again. He tests this out by fucking around in the memories that cycle through, jumping around and yelling obscenities at his mother, his high school girlfriend, his mentor at MIT. Nothing happens though, no matter what he does – the memories just play right on through, and the people in them don't react. Trying to change anything has about as much effect as yelling at your TV and hoping it'll make the ending of _The Revenge of the Sith_ change. The general idea seems to be to play along.  
  
Ash isn't down with that. That's fucking _boring,_ man. If this is his Heaven, it sure as hell can't be boring. He's stuck here forever, if the Good Book got it right at all.  
  
He figures that if it's his little mind-playground, he's gotta be able to do something about it with his mind. In the end it takes him about fifteen minutes (by his count, but in all honesty it could have been fifteen years because it's _Heaven,_ maybe time moves different here) to discover that Heaven is an environment that can be manipulated just as easily as Earth – easier, in fact, since things like physics don’t always seem to apply, and since he knows he sure didn't have this much sheer mental control over his environment when he was alive.  
  
Ash summons up the memory of his computer, runs his hands over the keyboard lovingly, then cracks open a beer and gets to work.  
  


\---

  
  
The first time he runs into a Winchester in Heaven, he's pretty sure that he hasn't been dead very long. His best guess is that it's been a day or two back on earth, but there's really no way to tell because it's Heaven time, you know – he's still working on getting those conversion algorithms right. Ask again in thirty-seven hours (thirty-seven Heaven hours, mind you), and maybe he can tell you.  
  
So anyways, he hasn't been dead very long, but he's already managed to crack through Heaven's _bitch_ of a firewall and get outside his own memories. He's having a grand old time wandering through someone's memories of Woodstock, where CCR is knocking out "Bad Moon Rising" while the crowd roars and whistles when he crosses into the next heaven over and sees Sam Winchester, sitting next to his brother on the hood of their black monster of a car.  
  
The Impala's parked in the middle of a wide open field, and the sky is dark and expansive above them, thousands of stars shining bright against the blue-black backdrop. Dean's looking at the stars and Sam's looking at Dean and he kind of looks like he might cry.  
  
Making the decision that being obnoxious at this juncture is probably both easier and more fun than trying to be comforting about the whole "sorry, you guys are dead" thing, Ash yells _"Sam 'n Dean!"_ loudly across the field and starts to saunter over to them.  
  
Sam's head snaps to look at Ash, but Dean just keeps looking at the stars, doesn't even move.  
  
Okay, not Sam n' Dean. Just Sam.  
  
Sam gets out "Ash?" in this weird, confused sort of voice, tearing his eyes away from his brother. "Are you–am I–are we _dead?_ "  
  
"Sí, compadre. Dr. Badass at your service, and yes, we are dead as doornails. Well, you and me anyways. I'm pretty sure your brother's fine."  
  
"But–" Sam looks back at his brother, who's still looking at the stars with a smile on his face, a big, pure grin that Ash can say for certain he has never seen on the living Dean Winchester's face. This Dean looks a little younger than the one he knows – not by much, maybe, but enough that it makes a difference. "But Dean's right here. Isn't he–"  
  
"See, it's like this. Think of Heaven as the Greatest Hits of Sam Winchester, all your happiest memories played out forever so you can live them over and over again." Sam looks a little confused, a little disbelieving, but he nods his head. "Dean's here because he's part of one of your memories. But see how he doesn't react?"  
  
Ash snaps his fingers in front of Dean's eyes. Nothing happens.  
  
"He's a fixed object, man, moving scenery in your own personal brain theater. So unless he's off in his own heaven somewhere, your brother's alive."  
  
Sam nods again and his face is unreadable, caught somewhere between what looks like desperate happiness and what might be – what could be – grief.  
  


\---

  
  
Ash and Sam have been sitting in the Roadhouse for a while, shooting some pool and knocking back a few beers – well, that's what Ash is doing while Sam mopes over being dead (and celebrates that his brother's not – he made Ash check, and Dean's nowhere to be found) with a fifth of whiskey at the bar – when all of a sudden the air gets heavy, almost sticky, like summer in Arkansas, while the lights start to flicker and the pool table starts to shake. Sam jumps up from the bar and looks around frantically, but there's nothing there, just an oppressive presence in the air and then, suddenly, a screeching sound like a hundred thousand crickets on steroids squeaking out a symphony of off-key notes.  
  
Then Sam's fading away, full-on disappearing from the legs up, and he must know more about what's going on than Ash does because he gets this look on his face like he's just realized something horrible and starts struggling, as if he can stop disappearing just by sheer force of will. He starts yelling something too, but Ash only hears "Dean, you dumb bastard, you _didn't_ –" before Sam's gone, vanished into thin air.  
  
The oppressive presence lifts immediately, but the screeching lingers for a few moments more, ringing in Ash's ears. It sounds angry, violated, invaded – royally pissed, basically.  
  
It takes him approximately eighty-seven hours – he knows that for sure this time, because his temporal conversion algorithms are all worked out properly now – to figure out that the screeching is Enochian, and that the dead aren't alone in Heaven.  
  


\---

  
  
There's a period of time where he starts seeing Dean Winchester really, really often. Like, thirty or so times in a row kind of often. It's never for very long – the first couple times, in fact, he thinks he's seeing things. He's crossing from heaven to heaven, taking a shortcut from some hippie's recollection of a Grateful Dead concert circa 1971 to what he thinks might be the memories of a camera guy from the original _Star Wars,_ and hell if he's gonna miss that – when the shortcut takes him through some shitty motel room where Dean Winchester's sitting next to a little kid on a couch.  
  
The kid's holding out a package wrapped in newspaper, and Dean looks weirded out and confused as hell but mostly just _happy._  
  
Then the scene disappears, as quickly as it appears, and Ash is in the heaven he was looking for, watching Mark Hamill and Alec Guinness act out the cantina scene from _A New Hope_ up close and personal.  
  
When he gets back to his own heaven and to the Roadhouse, he runs a sweep for Dean on the new and improved Find-A-Dead-Guy locator system he's working on perfecting, and as far as he can tell Dean's either alive or way, way downstairs, so he's got no idea what the hell he just saw. Maybe being dead is just getting to him.  
  
It happens again and again and again when he's crossing from heaven to heaven, mucking through memories – flashes of scenes with Dean in them appear, then disappear, like the flickering picture on the TV with the crappy antenna he had growing up.  
  
Then one afternoon (well technically, it's always afternoon in Ash's memory of the Roadhouse) an absolute metric fuckton of screaming comes in through the Enochian scanner on his computer, and from what he can manage to translate it mostly seems to concern Dean Winchester. It seems he's in Heaven, and the angels are not so much displeased as they are confused about that.  
  
He's barely finished translating the angels' screeching (and man, is Eiael bitchy today) when a message pops up on his computer screen, reading **LOOK AFTER THIS GUY FOR ME, GOTTA STORE HIM SOMEWHERE OTHER THAN DOWNSTAIRS FOR A WHILE. - G**  
  
He's barely finished reading it and hasn't really registered the weird factor just yet (because so far he's had no luck sending e-mails to people in _Heaven_ and he sure doesn't know anyone named G) when Dean Winchester pops into existence in front of the pool table, looks around and does a double-take at Ash like he's grown a second head.  
  
"Ash? What are you doing here? And since when hell look like the Roadhouse?"  
  
This leads to a bit of confusion about where they actually are. Ash tells Dean they're in Heaven, and Dean replies that that's a load of horseshit, because he's going to hell, thank you very much.  
  
At first Ash thinks he's trying to make some sort of stubborn point but then Dean explains that no, he actually signed on the demonic dotted line and he's really, contractually _bound_ to go to hell. He sits down at the bar and explains about the demons and the deal and Sam dying and Ash thinks it's really pretty depressing and explains a lot about the last time Sam was here but mostly it's just majorly fucked up in a whole mess of ways. But since he's not really willing to see whether getting punched in the face hurts as much when you're dead as it does when you're alive, he doesn't tell Dean any of that. Instead, he gets him a drink.  
  
As far as he knows from the research he did when he was alive and what he hears on his scanner, the angels are the only ones who can mess with where you get stuck after you kick the bucket, so he figures there's an angel involved in this shitstorm somewhere, but Dean swears he's never met an angel (still doesn't quite believe that there actually _are_ angels), let alone gotten to know one well enough for it to want to rescue him from hell, and that the last supernatural anything he saw back on Earth was a Trickster.  
  
You'd think the guy would be happier about, you know, not being in _Hell_ – but Dean's mostly just worried about Sam, worried that this counts as welching and that something's happened to his brother, no matter how many times Ash tells him that Sam's _not_ dead, because he would know.  
  
(He doesn't mention that that's only half true. He'd only know if Sam was dead and in Heaven. He's got no way to know if he's in Hell).  
  
Dean actually sticks around for a while, this time. Most of the time he's not with Ash. From what Ash can tell, he's in his own heaven. Hell if he blames the guy. Besides, once he shows him how to get around, Dean usually wanders through the Roadhouse every once in a while, grabs a beer and shoots some pool.  
  
Ash kind of likes having someone around once in a while, a real honest-to-God _person_ , even if the two of them don't say much, just drink and knock the stripes and solids into pockets. It almost feels like being alive.  
  
Then one day Dean wanders off after a round of drinks and a game, presumably back to his own heaven, and never comes back. Ash looks for him but doesn't find anything, not a trace of Dean Winchester anywhere in Heaven.  
  
He's never really sure what happened there, when he goes over it again later. Sometimes he thinks he imagined it all.  
  
He thinks he got another message from "G" saying **THANKS FOR GIVING DEAN A PLACE TO STAY WHILE HE WAS DEAD,** but he can't find it later when he goes through his files, and when he goes to tune up his temporal conversion algorithms they're completely shot, saying that technically, no time's passed on Earth or in Heaven the whole time Dean's been here. It takes him six beers and what he thinks is about twenty-eight hours to get the things calibrated right again.  
  
At this point, Ash is pretty sure that being dead might finally be fucking with his mind a little.  
  


\---

  
  
When Sam and Dean finally show up _together,_ Ash knows what's what – he's heard the angels talking. He knows that eventually, Dean got pulled into the Pit and that the angels pulled him back out again. He knows about Sam's demon blood and about the fact that the two of them, together, seem to have jump-started the apocalypse.  
  
When he sees them again, he doesn't mention any of that. All he does is say that they've been here before, that they die more than anyone he's ever met. It's the truth, after all.  
  
They don't ask what he means beyond that, and he's not really sure that he'd want to tell them. He's not sure why.


End file.
